Clickability Acquires a Patent for Visitor Testing

Upland Software, a web content management provider for B2B and B2C, has received a patent for its Clickability platform's ability to test web visitor segmentation and profiling.

This is the company's fourth patent for its website personalization and targeting solution, called Website Marketing Acceleration (WMA). In the tests covered by the new patent, marketers can try out their messages with specific site visitors on the actual site, such was whether the right content is being presented at the right point in the buying process. But WMA allows such testing without polluting the site analytics data.

'Without Impacting' Live Site

The testing shows such details as the messages and content that have been served, what kind of progress visitors make through profile levels, and how the visitors' lead scoring might change.

Deepesh Chourey, director of product and operations of Clickability at Upland, told CMSWire that his company believes the platform "is the only (Software-as-a-Service) SaaS [WCM] product that has an integrated content creation and dynamic publishing engine."

The new patent, he said, covers the ability to test segmentation and persona-driven journey experiences in a test mode "on the website without impacting the experience of the live website." These dry runs, Chourey noted, enable the testing to be turned "on or of without affecting website analytics," providing another tool in the A/B testing toolkit.

He declined to comment on whether the patent would affect the testing features in competitors' products.

The visitor dashboard for testing in Clickability

One of the unique features of Clickability's testing, Chourey said, is the ability to test in production environments "along with the fact of retroactively removing the affects from the analytics." This allows the testing to more effectively simulate end-user experience on [a] website," he told us.

Previous Patents, Sales

Two of the company's three previous patents for WMA covered analytics on forwards and backwards movement of visitors through profile levels, so that content could be targeted at "tipping points." The third patent related to the creation of profile levels, with the ability to set content for those levels.

The Austin, Texas-based Upland Software, a cloud-based provider of enterprise work management software, bought Clickability at the end of last year from content delivery network Limelight Networks, which had changed the original Clickability name to Limelight Orchestrate Content Management. Financial terms were not made public.

Clickability, which initially raised over $15 million in investment, was purchased by Limelight in the spring of 2011 for $10 million.

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